E-shots are a good way to drive targeted traffic to your website but if they're not done properly they can easily end up looking like SPAM. I take a look at things you can do to improve your click-thru and conversion rates.
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Increasing turnover with E-shots
Online marketing is a wide ranging game of trying to get people to click on a link and buy something. Some of the main routes you can use to achieve this are:
Old style SEO
search engine advertising with Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo (pay-per-click)
Targeted E-shots
Non-targeted e-shots (SPAM)
Link building
In todays article I'm going to look specifically at e-shots but its worth noting that e-shots should be part of a proper online marking campaign which should include a combination of the above techniques.
What are e-shots
Before we continue we must be clear that there is a very big difference between sending targeted, solicited e-shots and sending indiscriminate email to any email address you can get your hands on. The latter is generally referred to as SPAM and can get you fined or even put in jail. With that out of the way, lets carry on.
Building a mailing list
First step before you do anything else is to build a mailing list. The generally accepted way of doing this is to add a two field (name and email address) sign up form to every page on your website and have some sort of prize draw incentive. You can also have some sort of paper sign-up form if you have a physical store somewhere.
Make sure you have one 'master' mailing list which is the definitive list used to do all mailing, you need to have a process for combining your paper lists with your website list. You need to be sure that you state explicitly to the customer that you will be using their sign-up information for marketing purposes (i.e. 'By signing up you agree that we can send you a regular newsletter, etc, etc').
Designing your e-shot
There are several rules you need to pay attention to here:
Keep the design simple and make use of inline text, don't keep all your text in images!
An overly busy design can take time to load and confuse people, make sure you have one or two obvious 'calls to action'
Make sure your email text works without images, otherwise, if the email client has images blocked you may be out of luck
Its generally good practice to tell the user why they are receiving the email. e.g. 'you are receiving this email because you are registered with bla newletter'
You must, must, must let the user know how they can unsubscribe from your mailing list otherwise it could be classed as SPAM.
You should use your e-shots to promote special offers, make sure you let the user know how much they can save!
Think about using voucher codes, etc as click-thru incentives. It also stops users marking you messages as SPAM for future e-shots.
Thoroughly test your e-shot design in as many mail client as you can lay your hands on, MS Outlook 2007 is especially problematic these days. Unlike a webpage you only get one shot so it has to be right!
Make sure you have a text only version ready for people who cannot receive HTML email.
Picking a provider
Once you have a design you are happy with and you've fully tested it you need to pick a bulk emailing company. There are many on the market but the two I've had direct experience with are Communicator and dotMailer. These companies can provide tracking stats on click-thru's and tell you things like successful delivery rates, etc.
These bulk mailing companies tend to have peak periods when the service is slow and laggy so try to find out when these periods are before you go to send. Avoid sending last thing on a Friday, most people leave work early and the message gets buried in the Monday morning rush.
Lastly, make sure you always send your email in both HTML and plain text versions. This should be fairly easy to achieve as most mailing companies provide this facility.
Tracking your stats
As I mentioned above, many bulk mailing companies can track stats for all things email related. In particular they can tell you:
How many successful deliveries there were
How many bounces there were and of what type
How many people clicked-thru and what they clicked on
In some cases whether that click-thru resulted in a conversion
Whether the email was forwarded to anyone
Using this data you can tell how successful your email campaign was and what you need to change (if anything) to improve your results.
A/B testing
So the last thing you should be aware of when it comes to sending e-shots is A/B testing. I've covered this in the past when I've talked about A/B testing website designs and exactly the same principles apply here. Some bulk e-mailing companies will provide A/B testing services, you should make use of them if they are available. A/B testing can dramatically improve your click-thru rate so its well worth experimenting with different designs and offers.
Conclusion
That about covers the basics on sending an e-shot. The principles are basically the same whether you want to send an e-commerce special offer e-shot or a charity news-letter e-shot. You should go out of your way to ensure your emails are not marked as SPAM, you should always give the user a way to unsubscribe and you should always provide a plain text version.
As always if you have any comments or questions about anything I've said here then drop me a line
